The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for imaging or visualising the distribution relative to the component e.g. hydrogen and phosphorus contained in an object to be tested, i.e. sample by use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and more particularly to a testing method and apparatus by use of NMR which is suitable to decide the values of permeability and chemical shift in the sample and to image their distribution.
A technique of imaging or image-displaying the permeability distribution of a living body as a sample has been disclosed in JOURNAL OF MAGNETIC RESONANCE Vol. 70, pp. 163-168 (1986). This technique image-displays the phase information of the reconstructed image of a sample acquired by the testing apparatus using NMR and tests the distribution of the relative permeability by the image density.
This related art has the following disadvantage. Although it apparently displays the permeability distribution, actually it only displays simultaneously the phase distributions due to the permeability distribution and to the chemical shift; the former and the latter are discriminated so that the values of the permeability and the chemical shift can not be determined.